Re: "Eating your own dog food": Utiliflex has some pretty kick-ass API's. I've even gotten thank you emails from outside developers about them.

How did they get that way? We've developed against them. We are consumers of our own API's. Often in more than one language and framework. You can hit our API's with ....&return=json and get JSON, or ....&return=keyval and get url style key value pairs. You can post or get to them, and they all use https and basic auth. All that really matters is getting the name/value pairs correct.

Dan is right. At most companies: PHB (Point Haired Boss) says "We need API"
and a bunch of kids that had a class at school about API's once, write out a bunch of print statements that no one inside the company actually uses but gets documented and other people are forced to use.
Next step up is people that think XML is a programming/database language and
that whatever they create with UML tools like:
this crap is a standard anyone else should be able to use. Then "standards orgs" adopt these crap tools and business models as standards that are really just collections of paying vendors interfaces.

so the extra semicolons are a bug in the flutterby cms that are a rsult
of trying to patch around a bug in mobile Safari, but as for the rest:
most "XML" is created wit print statements and never parsed by the
producer. Which is why the situation sucks even more than basic XML.

That's.... not... even XML. Like, at all. How could you know anything about XML, even a little bit, and think
that was okay? Is there any tool anywhere that processes that? How did that ever even happen?